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9 Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

If you want to get organic traffic to your site, optimizing your blog posts for search engines is critical. WordPress SEO plugins can really help to simplify and speed up this process. However, with the myriad of SEO plugins available, it can be overwhelming to know how to choose the best one(s).

In this article, we will share the 9 best WordPress plugins to optimize your blog posts for SEO and grow your organic traffic.

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1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin that exists today.

It allows you to add an SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to all your posts and pages.

You can also optimize your pages, archives, categories, image titles, breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps and more. The entire list of features is extremely long!

Cost: Free and premium versions are available. A single site license of the premium version is $69 per year.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack is a comprehensive SEO plugin, and the #1 most downloaded WordPress plugin (over 30 million downloads).

Cost: Free and pro versions available. The pro version starts at $39 per year for the annual plan.

3. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps has been supported for over 9 years, and has been rated as the best WordPress plugin. It generates a special XML sitemap that helps search engines to crawl and index your blog. (Sitemaps make it easier for them to see the structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.)

This plugin also automatically notifies all major search engines whenever you create a new blog post or make changes to your site.

Cost: Free.

Note: It’s typically not a good idea to install multiple plugins that do the same thing. Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, and Google XML Sitemaps all share functionality, so choose one to avoid causing any issues.

4. WP Super Cache

This plugin has been heavily tested in real world conditions, is currently enjoyed by over 1 million active users.

Cost: Free.

5. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors your blog posts and your entire website content, looking for broken links and notifying you if any are found. Fixing broken links is not only important for the user experience, but it is important for SEO as well.

This plugin has the option of notifying you via the WordPress dashboard or via email. You can also choose to automatically prevent search engines from following broken links.

Cost: Free.

6. Rel Nofollow Checkbox

Rel Nofollow Checkbox adds a checkbox to the Insert/Edit Link dialog box, allowing you to quickly and easily add the nofollow tag to your links. This is important for controlling which pages you want to give credit to, and which pages you don’t want to give credit to as far as the search engines are concerned.

For example, you can use the nofollow tag to give credit to another site for an infographic you used in your post, without fully endorsing that site.

8. Redirection

Redirection allows you to manage URL redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and tidy up any loose ends that your blog may have. Especially when you are migrating pages from an old website, or when you’ve changed the directory of your WordPress installation, it is important to redirect your URLs to the new ones.

This plugin allows you to create 301 “moved permanently” redirects, which is recommended for SEO and passes between 90-99% of ranking power to the redirected page.

Cost: Free.

9. All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets

All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets improves your SEO by creating a short summary (a rich snippet) of your page in the search results. This gives search engines only the important information that you want them to display, and includes interactive elements like photos, star ratings, price, author, etc., to help you stand out from your competition in the search results.

This plugin helps you to rank higher by increasing your click through rate.

Cost: Free.

Conclusion

SEO can seem complicated at first, but with the right plugins it’s a whole lot simpler than you might think. Choose one of the plugins above to start with today, and you’ll be well on your way to higher rankings.

Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

Nice article! Have you ever testet our SEO plugin: https://delucks.com/en/wordpress-seo-plugin/? It knows the same as Yoast but also can create all kinds of sitemaps, control nofollows, has own social sharing buttons and a wdf*idf context optimization included. If you want to try it, just install the free version and start the 30 day test of the professional edition. Else, send me an email and I’ll provide you a testing license.

Janet Fuller

26 September 2016 at
1:05 am

All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets – is a very good plugin for using rating systems and it is also helpful for SEO.

Riche

29 September 2016 at
1:38 am

I’m glad to use this. which promotes high visibility in internet. So usefull for work. WPAdm.

Gemini

30 September 2016 at
12:47 am

Great work done by this plugin. It promoted me to go through top level in business. SEO Post Content Links by WPADM

Chris Gooden

1 October 2016 at
2:27 pm

Your comments re Yoast and All-In-One-SEO don’t include any warnings that using both is probably not a good plan. And both do XML sitemaps, so I guess it’s not good to have all three.

Fanie

1 October 2016 at
7:24 pm

Thanks host gator!

CAknowledge.in

1 October 2016 at
9:10 pm

Nice Article

Jerry Rice

1 October 2016 at
10:30 pm

Great article, I use all in one seo because its simple to setup and offers many of the functionality that is offered in the other plugins without having to install a lot of other plugins. Tip: never mix 2 plugins that do the same thing, or you will get duplicate tags that search engines dont like.

Amelia Willson

4 October 2016 at
11:06 am

Thanks, Chris and Jerry, for your comments! Good points about using multiple plugins for the same thing. I have updated the article accordingly with a warning note.

samdani

22 October 2016 at
3:28 am

Site must be seo friendly , other wise that will be in vain . In this case the collection of plugins is very helpful to make a site seo friendly . Thanks for sharing such great plugins here .